


Timeskip Snippet:  Recruitment Drive

by babylonsheep



Category: Worm - Wildbow
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 13:14:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11852325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babylonsheep/pseuds/babylonsheep
Summary: Week Three of the Cauldron Discord writing challenge.  Theme:  Timeskip.This one features a brief snippet of a PRT officer who gets an interesting proposition.





	Timeskip Snippet:  Recruitment Drive

_ "The PRT needs YOU!" _

The glossy brochures handed out by the smiling man at the recruiting office had had those words plastered large and loud on the front.  They were followed by other words, just as enticing:   _ "Employment Opportunities", "Career Advancement", "Training and Educational Certifications", _ and last but not least,  _ "Service to Country". _

Devin had been a week away from nineteen years old when he'd signed the contract and shaken the hand of the smiling recruiter.  In Devin’s other hand was the signing bonus check of thirty-five-hundred dollars, enough for him to break his lease and pay off his third-hand car.  Enough for him to leave his rusting rust belt hometown forever.  The old memories and the old steel mill's hourly wage had nothing worthwhile in them to hold him back.

Six months of training, half of it in the rambling backwoods of North Carolina with a platoon of scruffy-faced boys and short-haired girls who snored and sighed in their bunks at night.  The other half in the outskirts of a big city, spent stuffed into cramped folding desks in classrooms shared with teenagers in masks and soft-skinned office workers with an unlimited supply of yellow legal pads.

Six long months which turned into six years that went by in a flash, six whole years of wearing fifty pounds of armor and equipment that only came in matte black.  

Six years of routine had been brought to a screeching halt by a ball of orange fire that had ruptured Devin's eardrums and shattered the bones in his collar and shoulders and scoured away half the skin on the right side of his body, so that the morning change of his pink and crusted bandages became a chore he dreaded so much that it took all his willpower to force himself out of bed.

Six weeks into his bedrest and pudding diet, Devin was starting to feel as if he was back where he'd started.  Back to the beginning, his life at nineteen years old, looking around his dingy apartment with patched avocado green wallpaper and threadbare carpet, wondering where his life was going.  He knew he was wasting away, too frail to walk farther than the courtyard of the convalescent home, too weak to close the buttons on a proper pair of trousers, too fearful to bear the touch of his favorite worn-in denim chafing against his half-healed skin.

He knew he wasn’t far from the end of his rope when a stern-faced man in a suit of green Tinker armor had walked in one morning with an offer of fresh hope.  

"The PRT needs you," said the dark-haired woman on the tablet screen he'd been handed.  She had an odd accent that he couldn’t place; her features were plain and her face wasn’t made up like the typical recruiting video babe.  To Devin, she was radiant and beautiful and everything that he dreamed about.  "You have been selected for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.  A second chance at a new life.  A life with... _enhancements."_

It took six short seconds after the video faded to black for Devin to make his decision.


End file.
